This is the preface to the dynamic E-book which is about solving the food crisis. It is about how to get the adoption of the new technology we need.

A dynamic E-book is made up of multiple stand alone articles. If you are not interested in the process of innovation you can jump to the next article which explains why we have a food crisis. Just click below.

 

Solving the food crisis – the plan

Solving any problem goes through three stages.

The first is too often overlooked and is not easy, developing a clear understanding of what the problem is.

The second stage can be surprisingly easy, developing the technical solution.

The third stage is the most difficult – adoption, effectively applying the known technology.

Understanding the problem

There are two problems.

The short-term problem is that our current food system is deficient in the microbes which form our gut biome and essential minerals which have led to an epidemic of chronic or non-infectious diseases, obesity, diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.

The longer-term problem is our current food system relies on the exploitation of finite resources, particularly water, which is aggravated by climate change and shortages of key minerals which are being exhausted. Phosphorous is the most urgent.

The technology

We already have the technology, it is changing the way we grow our food using organic waste as a key input and controlling the conditions to breed the beneficial microbes so they out-compete the harmful microbes which make us fat and sick and kill us – a process of Eco-balance which has been going on for millions of years if we care to look.

Adoption

The real problem is how to get these known solutions adopted.

I have been innovating for much of my life with a spectacular array of failures and a few successes for which I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of Australia’s leading innovators.

But failures are not a waste, they are the way we learn so I want to devote this article to extracting the lessons from my failures (and the successes).

Learning from failures

The high-speed dolls pram

My first innovation dates back to the late 1940’s (yes I am very old).

I made a powered doll pram for my sister and it was a fantastic success, at least technically. It went so fast she could not keep up with it so it would result in spectacular crashes.

But the lesson is that this innovation, however good technically did not fill a real need. My sister was perfectly happy pushing her old dolls pram along and Mum was certainly not happy about this high-speed doll pram crashing into the furniture.

The road junction ramps

My next, not-so-brilliant idea, was in the 1950s when I proposed the idea that we could make road crossing safer by raising the intersection so cars would slow down before the intersection and speed up automatically as they left.

I remember explaining this to the local council who were very diplomatic to an over-enthusiastic teenager who had just learned about potential and kinetic energy at school.

They explained that this was not practical. The disappointment would have been less had they pointed out that if a hung around for a few decades there would be electric cars with regenerative braking which would do exactly what I was trying to do – capture the kinetic energy for reuse later.

Lesson – theory may be fine but it has to be practical.

The automotive crash absorber

Next was after I graduated in the 1960s when I was working for a Research Institute on the mechanical properties of plastics. I realised that while plastics had reasonable strengths they were very flexible, which is why they are called plastic and this meant they could absorb large amounts of energy.

So I designed a plastic shock absorber that could be fitted between a car’s chassis and the bumper bar (or fender in the US) which would absorb a large amount of energy.

Now, give my bosses their due, they thought this idea had merit and no doubt wishing to encourage a young graduate approached the car industry, on my behalf.

Their response was unenthusiastic saying there was no public demand.

This is a bitter learning experience because we made and tested some energy absorbers and they really worked.

The technology was sound and economic but the social conditions were not ready for acceptance.

It was years later when Ralph Nader became the champion for more safe cars and changed the public attitude.

But more than changing the public attitude, it changed the Government’s attitude, they introduced legislation on safety but even more importantly they introduced a star safety rating.

This meant that car buyers had a way of judging the safty of competing models and it turned out that the public cared and bought the safer cars so there was money for the car companies.

The lessons are that the social conditions must be right for innovations to be accepted and Governments can play a role in creating the right social conditions for the adoption of new technology.

The centrifuge

My most spectacular failure was in the late 1960s when I had this theoretically great but impractical idea of using a giant centrifuge to produce reinforced plastics.

It worked on simple shapes but there was no way of producing the preforms to make complicated shapes.

As the major benefit of plastics is the way they can be formed into complex shapes this was a total failure.

The lesson is that a simple but essential defect in an otherwise sound idea can lead to total failure.

Moldflow

That is enough of failures, lets have a story that started as a failure but ended up a major success.

I mortgaged my house to buy what I believe was the second mini-computer to come to Australia. It is now unbelievable that it cost one-third the value of my house but this was in the day of mainframes and punched cards.

I wrote a computer simulation of hot plastics flowing into a cold mould which was quite a technical challenge involving solving coupled non-linear partial differential equations. Fortunately, Newton had done all the hard work for me.

This simulation gave me a much better understanding of the mechanism of flow and I developed design principles such as flow balancing, which meant using the flow channels to control flow.

This meant that often the flow channels were much smaller than conventional flow channels.

Having spent all my money on buying this primitive computer I bought an around-the-world ticket, on credit on my American Express card, to tell the world about what I thought was a major innovation.

This meant leaving my long-suffering wife to work out how to feed our two kids which had magically appeared from nowhere, as kids do.

Innovators are generally too busy and preoccupied to have time to have kids but apparently not in my house.

Lesson – being an innovator is rugged, being an innovator’s wife is worse.

Changing the paradigm

So I went around the world giving lectures on flow balancing expecting to receive a warm welcome.

But what people heard was not what I said.

I was trying to explain a rather complex concept that you could use the computer simulation to redesign the flow path so it filled uniformly.

What they heard was if the mould does not fill make the flow channels smaller.

I actually said some flow channels but they missed the ‘some’.

The conventional wisdom and common sense say if the mould does not fill make the flow channels larger – obvious right?

Let me tell you that is not a pleasant experience standing up in front of a crowd who think you are some sort of nutter from down under where Kangaroos hop down the main street.

The important bit

There were some free-thinking entrepreneurial thinkers (actually I should use the correct term intrapreneurial as these were free thinkers inside large organisations).

I won’t say they believed me but they were adequately free thinking that I may have a point so they went away and tried it and it worked, and this is the important bit for them.

And they told other people that it worked for them and Moldflow just took off and was eventually a company worth over $500million. (I didn’t get $500million that went to the vulture capitalist.)

The lesson here is that you can’t change a paradigm by spending a fortune on promotion and advertising. (Particularly if you don’t have a fortune which is the norm for innovators.)

You need to find those free thinkers who have standing and let them try it for themselves.

 

 

Faster, better cheaper

I wrote a book, ‘Faster better cheaper’ which was about how to make plastics parts, you guessed it faster better and cheaper.

As soon as I had written it I asked myself if that was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, make plastics parts Faster, Better and Cheaper.

The answer was a resounding no, so I asked myself what is the biggest challenge facing humanity.

I don’t think that humans are so stupid that we are going to annihilate our species in an atomic war so I decided the answer is how are we going to feed billions of people healthy food in a sustainable way.

So that is when I sold the company and took a new direction in life.

Broad-acre subsurface irrigation

Time for some more lessons from failure.

I became very concerned about the supply of fresh water. We are draining aquifers that have taken millions of years to fill at an alarming rate. We needed a more efficient way of irrigating large areas like cow pastures.

So I developed a very low-cost subsurface irrigation tape which could be ploughed into the ground. Sounded good.

But when I saw the cows digging up the irrigation tape and eating it I knew I had got it wrong again. Why cows should dig up irrigation tape and eat it was unanticipated but that is the life of an innovator.

Project scrapped.

Lesson – prepare for the unexpected.

Adaptive irrigation control

For my next project, I thought I would develop what I called adaptive irrigation control but we now may put into the Artificial Intelligence bracket.

The idea was simple, collect all the information on how much rain falls and water is supplied from irrigation, measure the evaporation and soil moisture to learn how much water the plants are using, look at the predicted evaporation and then estimate how much water to apply at the next irrigation.

This is all in a continuous loop so the system is continuously refining its predictions.

Great idea (or so I thought) but this was way back in the late 1990’s and there was not the computer power available at that time so it failed. Good idea but no supporting technology.

Lesson – innovation does not occur in isolation and depends on the available technologies at the time.

Wicking beds

My next project arose from a trip to Ethiopia to see if I could find a way of providing sustenance food in times of drought.

The idea was very simple. Collect up a bunch of weeds because they are very efficient at extracting nutrients from the soil, much better than food plants.

Dig a trench, line it with a plastic film (there is an abundant supply of waste plastic bags available for free throughout Africa), fill it with weeds. Use more plastic bags to create catchments to feed any rain that falls into the beds.

It worked great but here comes the crunch.

The idea caught on, not in Africa but in wealthy Western countries. It was featured in TV gardening shows so received maximum publicity.

But they didn’t understand the basic principles so instead of using weeds they replaced these with dead inert rocks with no nutrients.

This has the advantage of increasing the time between watering which is popular and seems important in our modern high-pressure life, but does not feed us the nutrients we need.

Lessons I have learned

There is a very important lesson to be learned from these projects.

Innovators are rarely in a position to promote their own innovations, and anyway, they are biased so why should anyone believe them?

Adoption occurs because an independent source, preferably someone widely respected, hears about the idea, may be not convinced it will work but thinks it may have a chance of working, has some benefit, so tests it for themselves, finds it works then tells other people and the idea catches on and bingo – you have a paradigm shift.

Whatever the business textbook tells you about the way that innovations occur this is the way they occur in the real world.

The new hobby – leg chopping

My life took a major turn when my wife, a medical doctor, became diabetic her foot turned black and they wanted to amputate her leg.

I was not keen on the idea as she had nice legs and it seemed that she was not too keen on the idea either.

Eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes.

As I am getting on in years I am continuously amazed by what I see on Social Media like TikTok, I just cannot believe the weird things that people get up to.

But after serious thought, I have concluded that there is not some craze going around initiated by some video that has gone viral promoting the idea that it is a great hobby to eat the wrong food, get diabetes and have a leg chopped off.

Given the right information, at the right time (that is before sitting in the waiting room to have your leg chopped off) most people would think that two legs are better than one.

The question is how to get that message out when the world is saturated with billions of dollars of very clever, but manipulative advertising that our modern food system is healthy????

Maybe not TikTok

If it is not some craze on TikTok what is it that is causing eight million people a year to eat food that will lead to them having their leg chopped off, then what is it?

The answer lies in why we are the most successful creature on the planet. We are a magic combination of intelligent and cooperative.

To understand that we have to go back in time, I don’t mean to when I was born which may be a long time ago but much further.

Even further back in time when there were no Wheaties for breakfast but when we caught and ate Mastodons.

Let me tell you a bit about Mastodons, they are big, bigger than an elephant and they have two massive tusks.

If one human tried to kill a Mastodon the score would very quickly be Mastodon 1 human 0 with the human ending up skewered on the Mastodon tusks like a sausage on a stick.

Yet we ended up with Mastodon steaks in our figurative serial bowl for breakfast.

How did we do it? Because we are intelligent and cooperative.

If you have never been on a Mastodon hunt let me assure you that you don’t hang around thinking through every step using a process of logic, unless you want to end up skewered on a Mastodon trunk.

You are part of a team, you know what is expected of you and you do it (and quickly).

That is the way we work (or at least most of us). That is how we live together in cities of millions of people without too much trouble.

So what is the action plan?

We already have the technology of how to grow healthy food sustainably.

We just have to get people to adopt the technology.

We can’t do that by some scattergun internet marketing campaign.

We have to locate free-thinking intrapreneurs in the health profession, preferably some in Government responsible for community health in the prevention area.

We have to provide them with all the information they need so they can independently test it for themselves and decide whether this is marketing bullshit or the real world.

If they are convinced that this is for real they will then promote this to other health professionals who in turn will promote it to the wider public.

That is how ideas spread exponentially.

Keep reading, the rest of this dynamic E-book gets down to the nitty gritties.